FanLyst, a ticket resale site to connect them all

There's no shortage of websites where sports fans can resell their tickets: StubHub, SeatGeek, Vivid Seats, Ticket IQ, TickPick and TicketsNow, just to name a handful.

Then there's online ticketing giant Ticketmaster, which has recently moved into the resale game. And don't forget to include pro sports leagues that are further cluttering the market with sites like NFL Ticket Exchange, NHL Ticket Exchange and NBATickets.com.

The options are enough to spin the heads of season ticket holders looking for the site that will give them the right balance of interested buyers and low fees. Not to mention the challenge of posting tickets on multiple sites and making sure they aren't sold twice in different places.

Now three local entrepreneurs say they have a solution: one ticket resale site to connect them all.

That's the idea behind FanLyst, a Lemont-based startup recently launched by three Orland Park natives that allows ticket holders to post their seats at a single location and have it automatically list them on 17 resale sites. When a ticket is sold on one, it automatically removes the listings from all of them.

Ticket brokers have used such inventory management tools for years. StubHub earlier this year acquired one provider of a similar platform called Ticket Utils, whose technology allows major resellers to easily manage their tickets across the biggest resale sites.

But the technology is generally foreign to the average season ticket holder, which is who FanLyst sees as its target market.

Brokers that use the automated distribution and management technology "are reaching more buyers exponentially" than average fans, said FanLyst CEO Tim Alberts, 32, a Chicago attorney who launched an early version of the site late last year and then the current version in early September with two of his fellow Carl Sandburg High School alumni. "It's taking that (technology) and making it available to the general public."

FanLyst's business model, like those of most secondary ticket marketplace sites, relies on taking a cut of each sale. Since it is listing tickets on various sites, it must pay the 7 to 10 percent commission that many major resale sites take from sellers for each transaction.

That's why FanLyst's charge is higher: A flat 15 percent fee that Alberts believes will be worth it for fans to reach users on so many different sites without the hassle of having to post tickets to every one of them.

Another selling point, he says, is that not all resale sites let individual ticket holders post on them—only approved brokers are allowed. That means FanLyst, which has been vetted as a broker for all sites on which it lists tickets, may be able to advertise tickets where individuals can't.

"You want to reach as many people as you can," Alberts said. "That makes the prospect of FanLyst and reaching buyers on other sites appealing."

FanLyst had about 400 different listings over its first six weeks on the market, most of which included two or three tickets. About 1,000 individual tickets listed through the site have sold so far.

THE VALUE OF DISTRIBUTION

The company faces a challenge in standing out among the clutter of ticket resale sites. Its format can also be easily replicated using the application program interface (API) from the various resale sites it posts to, though anyone that does so must still be vetted as an approved broker.

On top of those obstacles, FanLyst must also convince resellers that listing on so many different sites actually helps reach more prospective buyers. StubHub still dominates the market—reportedly responsible for 50 percent of resale transactions. And with teams getting smarter about pricing their tickets to reflect market value, more buyers may be funneled toward fewer sites in the long run.

FanLyst's success will hinge on season ticket holders who don't mind turning a slightly smaller profit from selling the tickets in exchange for a one-stop shop for posting them, said Joris Drayer, a Temple University sports marketing professor specializing in ticket research who previously worked in sales for MLB's Oakland Athletics.

"That's how something like this potentially has legs," Drayer said. "The casual seller that has season tickets to a baseball team maybe doesn't care quite as much" as ticket brokers do about price.

Alberts said he and his business partners, who bootstrapped building the site together, have invested proceeds from FanLyst thus far into marketing it to ticket resellers.